


Hawk City

by Grit Paperbaxs (prxs)



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, F/F, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:41:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23881717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prxs/pseuds/Grit%20Paperbaxs
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

Of all the basements in Hawk City, she had to walk into mine. Five foot three, dark puppy eyes, and lips as red as my graded papers. ’Nuff years in this job and you get to know her type like the smell of gunpowder or the taste of bottom-shelf chocolate milk: the excess nicotine, the expensive perfume, the sweet voice stringing together an endless sequence of sugary lies.

“Michael Wheeler, isn’t it? I heard you’re the best sleuth in town.”

See? She’d already started.

“Call me Mike,” I said without raising my butt from my seat or my feet from the desk. “I find that hard to believe. I am nobody’s favorite. Not even my father’s.”

She blessed a chair with her patronage and gazed at the empty desk by the window—the tidier, sunnier corner of the office. “Perhaps they meant your partner then.”

“That is possible.”

“Should I wait for him?”

“I wouldn’t advise it. He’s dead.”

She feigned shock, I feigned an apology. I can be blunt sometimes. I can be sharp too, but that train hasn’t rolled by in a long time.

She put a cigarette in her mouth and I offered her a flame from my novelty T-Rex lighter. She produced a tiny billow of smoke, and a photograph from her handbag.

“This girl’s been missing for two days,” she said. “Her name is El. El Hopper.”

I perused the picture. Lovely girl. The kind of pure beauty unadorned by makeup, or hair.

I slid the picture back to my visitor, which didn’t go smoothly because of all the dry salsa stains increasing the friction on my desktop, and asked, “What is she to you?”

“She’s the daughter of a friend.”

“Is your friend not concerned enough to seek help himself?”

“He has the concern. I have the money.”

“Yet you came to the certainly-not-best sleuth in town.”

“I have the money—not a lot of money.”

“Your earrings say otherwise. See, I pay attention to details, Loise.”

“It’s Joyce.”

“Whatever. Where was she seen last?”

She sat back and crossed her legs, pretending to ignore my pretending to ignore the exposed skin on her thigh.

“Home. Her roommate Maxine. Goes by Max. They share a place in the Nora Warrens. Max left for work at one. At six thirty, El called her at work; that’s the last time they spoke. When Max got back at nine, El was gone. Shouldn’t you be taking notes?”

“I have an eclectic memory.”

“Eidetic.”

“What?”

“Eidetic memory is a very good memory; eclectic memory would be... like having memories in different art styles and time periods.”

“Okay. I’ll remember that now. Actually, let me write it down. What did they talk on the phone?”

“There was a party. El didn’t want to go alone, Max didn’t want to go at all. Long drive. Disreputable venue. E-I-D-E-T-I-C. Max thought she’d convinced her to let it go, but she got home to a note on the fridge.”

“What venue could be more disreputable than the Nora Warrens?”

“Brenner Manor.”

I said nothing, the silence punctuated only by the tinny, battery-powered roar from the lighter I was fidgeting. Seems you cannot walk a block in this town without stepping on the shadow of Dr. Martin Brenner, the debunked scientist–turned–government contractor–turned–puppetmaster of Hawk City.

“Interesting,” I said. “Do you want to know why I think it’s interesting?”

“Because El didn’t want to go to the party alone, yet she went without Max, which means she found another plus one.”

“Okay. That’s actually more interesting than what I was thinking.”

“Back when you had a partner, did people ever refer to your firm as ‘the smart one and the other one?’”

“Quite often. I thought it was unfair, cause my partner was pretty smart too. So you suspect this plus one of hers got her into trouble? How would that work?”

“I don’t know; I was thinking of hiring a P.I. and finding out. Matter of fact, I think I’ll go do that now,” she said standing up and turning her back on me, a gesture that no heterosexual man would find offensive.

“It’d better be a good one too,” I said. “Of course a really good P.I. might start bothering you with all the questions that you’re so gracefully dodging. Like why would somebody with an uptown girlfriend like you have a daughter living in the Nora Warrens. Or why would someone from the Nora Warrens ever get invited to Brenner Manor.”

I could see her eyes broaching me from across the room, hand frozen over the door handle.

“I never said she was invited.”

“You never said a lot of things I’d love to hear,” I said while I wandered towards her, like a man accosting the edge of a cliff. “Your moisturizer brand. The winning numbers for the Saturday jackpot. ‘Hi, we’re playing soccer and I want you on my team.’”

For the first time our sight lines were perfectly level—thanks in part to some pixie proportions on her behalf and an eerie lankiness on mine.

“You don’t need the best sleuth in Hawk City to tell you that no estranged little girl from the sticks would walk into Brenner’s playground both willfully and with law-abiding intentions. What will you tell your P.I. when the matter comes up?”

She did not flinch, but I could tell I’d made a crack in the ice. Bluntness can get you there too, sometimes.

“El became my friend’s daughter only recently. There’s much about her past we don’t know. Much she doesn’t know herself. She’s been searching for answers.”

“If the trail leads to Brenner Manor, maybe those answers are better left buried.”

“Her father would agree with you.”

“Why bring the case to me then?”

“El had contacted a guy claiming to have seen deep inside Brenner’s closet. Deeper than anyone would want to see, let alone be willing to share. Max found his name in El’s notes. Will Byers.”

I could hear thunder rumbling. Not that it was cloudy outside. It was probably three hundred miles away. But I could hear it in the quiet that followed the name anyway.

“Anyway,” she anadiplosed, finally opening the door. “I guess I’ll go find that top-rate sleuth now. Good-bye, Mike.”

“Yes, you do that,” I managed to say. And also, “Good-bye, Joyce.”

She left, the echo of her high heels haunting the stairway. I closed the door, and I was confronted once more by the vinyl letters on the glass panel.

WILLIAM BYERS

MICHAEL WHEELER

Private Eyes


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PREVIOUSLY ON HAWK CITY: deadbeat private detective Mike Wheeler is hired to locate a missing girl, El Hopper, who was seeking clues to her own past with the assistance of Wheeler's presumed late partner Will Byers.

People say the Nora Warrens used to be a classy neighborhood. Of course, they’re the same old-timers who claim snuff tobacco used to be chic or that MTV was once transgressive. Still it compared favorably to the disaster area that is my office on a Monday morning: the rainbows in the water spray from a bust hydrant and the mom and pop liquor stores added a nice splash of color, and the weather was quickly repairing my chronic vitamin D deficiency. All in all, I was in unusually good spirits and nodding to the favela funk while I pedaled to the top of the hill, parked my BMX next to a fresh-waxed ’78 Camaro in front of the building and entered just as a delivery woman was checking the mailboxes.

“Morning! Got something for me? Max Mayfield.”

She dumped a parcel on me with a concerning lack of ceremony and left me alone. I checked the apartment number on the label and climbed upstairs.

I could hear the quarrel in the apartment from two landings down. Deeming it rude to interrupt, I opted for putting my ear on the door and eavesdropped on the bitching match.

“—not an excuse! You pay your rent in time!”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re short half our income cause El is missing!”

“Not my problem, Max! Just one less butt for me to kick out if I don’t get my money tomorrow!”

“One _fewer_ butt,” I whispered to myself.

“Screw you, Billy!”

“Tomorrow!”

That last line sounded close enough for me to straighten up just as the door swung open and I confronted the guy—at a short enough distance for his cigarette to nearly burn my eyebrows. I stepped back to fully appreciate the mullet, open shirt, belt buckle depicting a very unlikely sex act between a skull and a rattlesnake. He had the look of a coked-up rockstar who is about to have someone executed after finding a non-red M&M in his hotel suite. I showed him the parcel in my hands.

“I’m delivering a package.”

“Fascinating,” he growled. “Can’t wait till they make the movie.”

He shoulder-bumped me into the next county and stormed down the stairs, leaving a trail of Blue Steel Tornado Buffalo Testosterone aftershave in his wake. I walked through the open door.

The place looked homely in a way that stayed loyal to the neighborhood. There was a coziness to the wallpaper stains and curbside furniture that most struggling playwrights’ studios in the East Village fail to achieve. Before I realized, I had walked the full two feet of the corridor and flowed into a kitchen. Something that I’d mistaken for an oven fire at first glance spoke:

“The hell are you?”

I reassessed and identified my host, Max Mayfield, standing by the sink. Rolled-up sleeves, varicolored flannel, and a stance that would suit the choose-your-fighter screen in an arcade game. I could picture boys falling over themselves for that redhead. And girls falling over themselves too. The girls she might bother to catch before they landed.

I left the parcel on an oilclothed table and introduced myself: “Mike Wheeler, B&W Investigations. Your landlord left the door open. Nice man.”

“Nice oxymoron,” she replied. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I happened to be biking around your corner of the woods, enjoying the local flavor,” I said without a hint of irony, pulling a chair. “I thought I might ask you a couple questions. Is that fresh ground coffee I smell? I would love a cup.”

“It’s instant coffee. It smells like llama droppings. And still it’s too good for you. What’s your other question?”

Tough girl. I would have to dial my charms up to eleven.

“Okay, anything you can tell me to help me find El Hopper?”

She frowned harder.

“Hopper got you into this?”

“No, a friend of his did. Joyce.”

“Oh. I thought she might,” she said, somewhat relaxing her pose. “She wouldn’t want Hopper to do something stupid. Glad she hired a professional.”

“She never really hired me, actually; the case just got my attention. I hear your friend was meeting my friend. I haven’t heard of him since his funeral last November, so I was naturally curious.”

“You’re a friend of Byers? You can tell him to go drown in the Sattler Quarry next time you see him.”

“Careful”, I begged.

She pressed her lips and her cyan eyes shirked me for a fraction of a second. I understood that was her best impression of a regret.

“Listen, looks like we both lost someone dear,” I recapitulated. “We’re emotional. Let’s cool down before we say something that might annoy you momentarily or scar me for life.”

“Why do you believe we’re talking about the same Byers?”

“Because I need to. What does yours look like?”

“I never met him.” She pointed me to a small pile of papers in a writing nook, like somebody’s scrapbooking efforts had been raked in to make room for breakfast. “El has a… troubled past, to put it mildly. She doesn’t remember much before Hopper adopted her at age eleven. She wasn’t eager to remember at first, but in time she began to dig. Hopper didn’t want to help, so I did. But then we started getting dirty.”

I could see that thumbing through the newspaper clippings: claims of kidnappings in state orphanages, conveniently deceased plaintiffs, laconic official responses.

“And when you stopped helping her, Byers took over,” I guessed.

“That’s right. This Byers guy with his Deep Throat antics. Distorted calls, never-meet-in-person policy. I didn’t trust him.”

“Weird,” I commented. “I mean, look at us: we just met and we’re like best pals, right?”

“Yeah, what can I say? I trust no one. El’s the trusting one,” she said, snatching the notebook from me and replacing it by a Post-It pad, the note on top reading, _Byers, HC Library, 7:15_. “That’s where they were going to meet. Set right after I tried to convince El to drop a clue she was chasing.”

“The party at Brenner Manor.”

“Not the best place for a first date; I think you’ll agree. You still vouching for your friend?”

“I see nothing against him here,” I declared. “I understand your animosity though. You girls used to sit here in your cozy kitchen solving your mysteries, cupping a nice coffee while piecing El’s life together…”

“I. Am. Not. Giving. You. Coffee.”

“...Then the picture in the puzzle gets ugly, you get queasy, so she finds a new sleuthing partner and you grow jealous. I understand that,” I said. I could see I was striking a chord deep behind her God-I-wish-I-had-an-elevator-shaft-to-throw-you-down glare. “Anyway, how do you even know she was going to meet Byers? He sounds like the shy kind.”

“It says so right here. Hawk City Library, 7:15.”

“But she only arranged that after you told her you wouldn’t go with her. You two spoke last at six thirty. Do you need to write down the time for a rendezvous that’s happening in less than an hour?”

This time there was a pause before her comeback.

“See? I’ve got some brains after all,” I said, sitting back, tapping my temple. “This is not just a prop-up for my awesome hair.”

“ _I_ have awesome hair,” she said. “You look as if a woolly mammoth’s testicle entered an Amélie impersonator contest.”

“Maybe, but I got a clue, and that’s worth celebrating. Instead of coffee, how about one of those cookies you got in the oven?”

“I’m not baking cookies, you babbling poodle—do I look like Aunt Jemima to you?”

“Then why do I hear a kitchen timer ticking?”

We fell silent, looking around for some clock that might have eluded my first scan of the room and, less plausibly, hers.

Our eyes finally converged on the parcel I’d brought upstairs and left on the table, just as the clockwork device stopped ticking.

I shouted, “Duck!”, and threw the parcel through her afterimage and the open window. The explosion still knocked over all the bottles in the spice rack and Max’s instant coffee mug—not to mention it rattled the whole building like a tectonic plate spasm.

We ran to see the damage in the street. There seemed to be no victims. Max turned at me like she had her mind made to fix that:

“You brought that package here!”

“It was addressed to you!” I pointed out, remembering the despondent delivery woman who, in hindsight, was probably not a delivery woman. Max’s attention was back on the fire and screams down below. “Somebody wants you dead.”

“Yup. Guess we have that in common now,” Max said.

“I didn’t get a bomb in the mail.”

“No, you just yote one onto my landlord’s Camaro.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will continue for kudos. thank you for your appreciation


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PREVIOUSLY ON HAWK CITY: our hero (*sigh*) visits El's roommate Max Mayfield. He finds a clue and incidentally spares Max from being Unabombed by an unknown party.

The ride back from the Nora Warrens was considerably faster than the ride up on account of gravity and the need to outrun a howling sociopath in constrictor jeans who had just witnessed his emotional support muscle car being turned into abstract expressionism. I barely noticed the extra weight of Mayfield riding pillion until we’d sunk back into the smog downtown, whereupon I pulled over at the corner of 2nd and Oak and tried to catch my breath and put my ideas in order. The last couple years’ worth of them, at least.

“Okay, let’s figure this out. How many mortal enemies you think your legendary congeniality has garnered you in the last…let’s start small—forty-eight hours?”

“Screw that,” Max replied, right on brand. Her hair was still coughing up dust from the explosion. “It’s evident who did this: Brenner’s people! El was getting too close!”

“I agree, but the package was sent to _you_. If I wanted to kill El Hopper, I would address the package to El Hopper. And if I wanted to kill El Hopper’s roommate I would also address the package to El Hopper. But they had your name. How did they get your name?”

She gave it some thought, then concluded, “El would never give it to them. Not willingly.”

A police cruiser rushed past us toward Nora, sirens blaring. I pretended to be very interested in the texture of a utility pole.

“They still have her,” Max added after the sirens had faded out. “I gotta get her back.”

“No, _we_ gotta get her back.”

She frowned. “I thought you hadn’t taken the case.”

“Yeah, well, the case is taking me anyway. And I don’t work well without a partner.”

“Really? Amazing; you give quite the opposite vibe,” she commented. “So how would you get El back?”

I pointed at the building in front of us. “Easy. Retracing her steps.”

Not many people recognize Hawk City’s library at first sight anymore—an obstinate memory of a time when governments promoted literacy and cultural life in this town amounted to something more than strip clubs and owl fights. Nevertheless, if we tried to squint away the graffiti and the hobo camping on the gray lawn as we climbed up the steps, the portico still evoked the institution’s former glory, bygone days when the city had not yet beaten the thirst for knowledge out of its denizens. Few come to find shelter within these walls anymore.

Will used to be one of them.

As we walked through the doors I fished out of my pocket the Post-It I’d rescued from Max’s apartment. We reread the words: _Hawk City Library, 7:15._

Her eyes went to the signs on the side of the bookcases. We quickly located the sevens (natural sciences), then the seven tens (zoology), then the seven fifteens, befittingly confined to a bottom shelf: reptiles and amphibians.

“This has nothing to do with what El and Byers were investigating,” Max noted as we knelt down to check the spines.

“Which makes it a perfect place to hold their communications,” I said, starting to thumb through the pages of a field guide.

“I think they were both wiser than just leaving their messages here. El would have destroyed it after reading it.”

“Good point. Does El smoke?”

“No.”

“Then we’ve got a chance,” I said, locating the nearest trash can.

We poured its contents onto a table, which did not seem to bother the couple patrons in sight. A nerdy girl perusing a hefty chemistry volume pretended not to notice. A grizzly old drifter reading Dostoevsky at the far end of the room gave us a nod that seemed to mean, _Yup, we’ve all been there_.

We swept out of the way the old newspapers, sandwich wrappings, empty PEZ dispensers (yes, I checked), and other detritus on whose nature I would rather not dwell. We then picked away every piece of paper that looked whole and focused on all the shredded bits left behind. I soon recognized the hand in some of them.

By the time we’d reconstructed the message, I could hardly read it. I didn’t care what those letters spelled. I cared what they meant by themselves, the long-spurred _G_ and the nice, rounded _A_ ’s. This note in front of me had been whole—had been composed—only two days ago. But the boy behind this handwriting I had believed dead for months.

Max elbowed me out of the flashback.

“Sorry. Yeah. ‘Crooks Ahoy. Ask for Dingus.’ I know Crooks Ahoy; it’s a den near the docks. Sorry it took me so long to read that.”

“Not as long as it’s taking that woman to read a single page,” Max pointed out.

I checked the nerdy girl some twenty feet off again. She was still reading the same chemistry volume, on her feet. Her arms must feel tired.

“I need to pour some water on my face. Wait for me.”

I walked past the woman’s aisle, her eyes and mine meeting briefly as I hurried up toward the restroom. I turned around the corner, opened the door, and closed it, without walking through it.

Then I quietly retraced my steps, tip-toed to the woman’s aisle through the other end. I caught her from behind while she was spying on Max at our trash-ridden table.

“You sure are into chemistry, aren’t you?”

She spun on her feet, saw me, then saw the bulge of the weapon I was aiming at her through my pocket.

“Yes,” she said, swallowing. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Oh, really? What’s the formula for water?”

“H2O; everybody knows that.” She looked closer at the shape inside my jacket. “Is that a PEZ dispenser?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” I announced, which Max immediately undermined as she joined us by asking, “Who are you?”

“My name is Nancy.” She went for her pocket; I signaled her against any sudden moves by pressing the PEZ dispenser under her ribs. “I’m with the _Hawk Watcher_.”

Max took her wallet, checked the ID, flashed it in my direction: Junior Reporter.

“Why are you following us?” Max inquired.

“I saw you coming out of the house after the explosion. I thought you looked suspicious. And I badly need a scoop.”

“Talk about being in the right place at the right time.”

“I could say the same for you,” Nancy retorted.

“We were innocent bystanders,” I clarified.

“Yeah, I figured out you wouldn’t be the kind to put bombs together when you didn’t know the formula for water.”

Max gave me the kind of look that one gives to dogs who just wetted the carpet. “You don’t know the formula for water?”

“I use pre-mixed water, and I happen to make an excellent spaghetti carbonara with it, thank you very much,” I defended myself. “So wait—you followed us here all the way from the Nora Warrens?”

“Yes,” Nancy said, jerking loose of my grip and smoothing her pullover. “You’re riding a BMX; it was easy.”

“That’s what worries me,” I said, lowering my novelty weapon and turning to Max. “How can we be sure no one else followed us?”

We learned the answer to that when the first burst of gunfire made confetti out of the chemistry section.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will continue for kudos. thank you for your appreciation


End file.
